‘Cujo with a Chimp’: Primate Premieres at Fantastic Fest with Gore, Practical Effects and a Last‑Minute Rewrite
Paramount Pictures’ horror film Primate had its first public screening on Sept. 18, 2025, when it opened Fantastic Fest in Austin. After the screening, director Johannes Roberts and stars Johnny Sequoyah and Troy Kotsur spoke to the audience and shared stories from the shoot.
Premiere and festival screening
Primate premiered publicly as the opening film of Fantastic Fest on Sept. 18, 2025. The festival is held annually in Austin and focuses on horror, extreme cinema, and genre movies. Following the screening, Roberts, Sequoyah, and Kotsur spoke to the audience and recounted three behind-the-scenes stories.
Story and cast
The film stars Johnny Sequoyah as Lucy, a young woman who returns from college to her family home in Hawaii. Her family includes a Deaf father, played by Troy Kotsur, and a younger sister. The family keeps a pet chimpanzee named Ben.
In the movie, Ben contracts rabies, becomes unpredictable and violent, and attacks the family’s friends one by one.
Creature effects and inspiration
Director Johannes Roberts said the idea for Primate came from Stephen King’s novel and the 1983 film adaptation of Cujo. Roberts said, “I’m a massive, massive Stephen King fan, and a massive fan of Cujo.”
Roberts described using an actor, Miguel Torres Umba, in combination with prosthetics, puppetry and animatronics to create Ben. He said, “We did build all these animatronics, sculpts and stuff — there’s like a million different things we used there. If any of you have seen a behind-the-scenes of Cujo, seen all the different varieties of things that happened on that, [it’s] that kind of thing. I could go on for ages about how the different crazy things we bought, but for me, the big thing was he had to have a personality. […] I wanted, in a sense, almost Freddy Krueger.”
Roberts also noted the film uses practical effects, including prosthetics and puppetry, to achieve the chimp’s appearance and behavior.
On-set choices and reactions
Speaking through a translator, Kotsur explained his approach to horror scenes versus dramatic scenes. He said, “When you’re acting in a drama, you really have to prepare and have that feeling with what’s going on,” he said. “And with horror, it’s almost better when you don’t know what’s going on until you actually see it. […] You have to have an authentic reaction.”
For one scene, Kotsur asked the production not to show him a grotesque corpse prop ahead of time. He said, “‘I don’t want to actually see [the corpse prop ahead of time],’” he said. “‘I’d prefer to be surprised. I want the camera to shoot my raw reaction.’ So when it was time to shoot, and they called ‘Action!’ they actually brought out this dead body. it really freaked me out. So what you see on screen was my actual first reaction.”
Kotsur also described a moment after shooting when he still had fake blood on him in public. He said, “I had a lot of blood on me throughout this production,” he said. “And I was sitting down in a restaurant after production. A waiter screamed at me, and said, ‘What’s wrong? You’ve got blood all over your hands!’ I thought I had already washed all of the fake blood off, and of course I was fine, but there was blood on my hands throughout that entire shoot. So that was my favorite part, was seeing that waiter’s reaction.”
Last-minute script changes and release
Roberts said the script for Primate was rewritten shortly before filming. He said, “I started this 15 years ago. The script was done, and we are there, [in the] studio and everything, maybe literally a week before filming,” Roberts said. “And suddenly […] it’s like, This fucker shouldn’t live.”
He added, “So a week before filming, we just rewrote the entire script and killed [that character]. I love it.” Roberts also said of another death, “Even now, I watch it and I’m uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons. And that kind of thing is really great. [This particular death] is horrible — it felt horrible when we were doing it. It felt like doing a snuff movie.”
Producers on the film include Walter Hamada and John Hodges. Paramount Pictures has scheduled Primate to open in U.S. theaters on Jan. 6, 2026.
